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Featured in Development

Understandability is the concept that a system should be presented so that an engineer can easily comprehend it. The more understandable a system is, the easier it will be for engineers to change it in a predictable and safe manner. A system is understandable if it meets the following criteria: complete, concise, clear, and organized.

Featured in Architecture & Design

Sonali Sharma and Shriya Arora describe how Netflix solved a complex join of two high-volume event streams using Flink. They also talk about managing out of order events and processing late arriving data, exploring keyed state for maintaining large state, fault tolerance of a stateful application, strategies for failure recovery, data validation batch vs streaming, and more.

Featured in Culture & Methods

Tim Cochran presents research gathered from ThoughtWorks' varied clients and projects, and shows some of the metrics their teams have identified as guides to creating the platform and the culture for high performing teams.

News

Splunk, a platform for searching, monitoring, and examining machine-generated big data, has launched a new release of application monitoring tool SignalFx Microservices APM™. The new release combines NoSample™ tracing, open standards based instrumentation and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven directed troubleshooting from SignalFx and Omnition into a single solution.

Kubernetes management platform creator, Rancher Labs, has released Rancher 2.4 in line with their ‘Run Kubernetes Everywhere’ strategy. Rancher is a heterogeneous, multi-cluster, multi-cloud Kubernetes management platform. The new release is focused on providing the scalability, management and security capabilities required to support Kubernetes at edge scale.

In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced new updates to its Dedicated Host service in Azure. The public cloud vendor made a few updates to the service such as cost-saving reservations, maintenance control, further options with SKUs, and Resource Health alerts.

The Eclipse Foundation released MicroProfile 3.3 featuring updates to five APIs - Rest Client, Config, Fault Tolerance, Metrics and Health. Other improvements include clarifications and enhancements to specifications and documentation, improved integration among all the MicroProfile APIs, interoperability across different MicroProfile implementations, and a complete set of artifacts for each API.

Backed by IBM and adopted by the Linux Foundation, Project OWL aims to make it possible to build mesh network nodes that are able to reconfigure themselves to avoid prolonged connectivity loss. The project targets scenarios such as natural disasters, where communication links become quickly unavailable or unreliable.

Concurrent with the formal release of Java 14, New Relic announced the release of their real-time Java profiling and JVM cluster timeline view utilities to more effectively troubleshoot performance bottlenecks in Java applications. Ben Evans, principal software engineer and JVM technologies architect at New Relic, spoke to InfoQ about these new tools.

Dr Juan Fumero presented at QCon London on TornadoVM, a plug-in to OpenJDK and GraalVM that runs Java on heterogeneous hardware including Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Demos during the presentation showed code being sped up by hundreds of times when running on a GPU vs a CPU.

As N26 grew fast, they had to scale their technology to keep up. This meant scaling not only their infrastructure, but also their teams; for instance, they had to decide how to distribute work over teams and what technology to use or not use. Folger Fonseca, software engineer and Tech Lead at N26, shared his experience from scaling technology at N26 at QCon London 2020.

At the 2019 Spark AI Summit Europe conference, NVIDIA software engineers Thomas Graves and Miguel Martinez hosted a session on Accelerating Apache Spark by Several Orders of Magnitude with GPUs and RAPIDS Library. InfoQ recently talked with Jim Scott, head of developer relations at NVIDIA, to learn more about accelerating Apache Spark with GPUs and the RAPIDS library.

After acquiring Pivotal at the end of last year, VMware has detailed in a Webinar how it will go about fulfilling its strategy aimed to help customers build their apps, run them using Kubernetes, and manage them from a single control plane.